Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today's market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a "sale by owner"—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with...

" /> Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today's market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a "sale by owner"—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with...

" /> Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today's market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a "sale by owner"—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with...

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Housing Bulletin: An Upgraded Web Site for City and Suburban House Hunters

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Thanks to some cool upgrades that launched last week, Dreamtown.com is now my pick for the most useful and informative Web site in Chicago for shopping for real estate.

Like countless other real-estate sites, Dreamtown provides access to all the properties listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI); offers tips on how to buy and sell in today’s market; and purports to provide tips on how to do a “sale by owner”—while actually making the not-very-subtle pitch that you would much rather go through an agent.

But Dreamtown sets itself apart with…

On the Market—To the Manor Reborn-Winnetka

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List Price: $3,997,000
The Property: In 2002, Marge Johnsson bought this red brick manor house—which had been designed nearly 100 years earlier by the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw—as the freshman rehab project for Magnolia Restorations, the company she was then launching. “I wanted to do it the way Shaw would…

Housing Bulletin—Kerry Wood Takes a Loss

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Kerry Wood has sold his house in Chicago’s Old Town Triangle for $1,201,000. That’s $2,000 more than he was asking at the time it sold, but $94,000 less than he paid for it in 2004—which means the Cubs pitcher took a 7 percent loss on the property.

In October 2004, Wood and his wife, Sarah, paid $1,295,000 for this house on a narrow 19th-century street a few blocks west of Lincoln Park. Built in 1876 (most likely by German immigrants), the seven-room, three-bedroom house has been…

Sale of the Week—A Princely Old Town Rowhouse

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List Price: $1,450,000

Sale Price: $1,325,000
The Property: William Wood Prince, the Chicago philanthropist and executive whose family once controlled the Union Stockyards and the Armour & Co. meat empire, has sold a 19th-century rowhouse in Chicago’s Old Town that he had owned for two decades.

The tall red-brick rowhouse, built in 1886, has classic good looks: a half-hexagon bay rimmed with high, limestone-capped windows stretches up to an overhanging cornice. Inside, the dining room, kitchen, and family room are on the ground floor (where the servants’ workspaces would have originally been), and there is a 450-square-foot living room on the second floor (where the raised front door is). The master suite is on the third floor, and there are three more bedrooms above that…

On The Market—A Hanging Stair in Logan Square

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List Price: $1.149 million
The Property: Behind the dignified 103-year-old façade of this Logan Square greystone stands a contemporary interior by the ultra-stylish Funke Architects. Its most dramatic element is a hanging staircase of steel, glass, and maple. It floats beneath a rooftop pop-up of clerestory windows that let daylight cascade all the way to the basement, creating a far lighter mood than the characteristically dark interior of a historical greystone.

That lightness carries through the three-story structure. The main floor is an airy layout of formal and informal spaces, including a sleek kitchen with…

Housing Bulletin—U.S. Representative Melissa Bean on the Mortgage Crisis

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In the mid-1980s, when Melissa and Alan Bean bought their first home, in Elmhurst, they didn’t know until after they had signed all the papers that they had taken out a very risky mortgage, one that included a provision for “negative amortization”—the alluring possibility of paying less per month than the interest accrued. (A loan like that can quickly turn into an upside-down situation, where the homeowner owes more than the house is worth.) It was a mistake the couple corrected as soon as they understood what they had done.

Two decades later, Melissa Bean, now representing Illinois’ 8th District, (Chicago’s northwest and far north suburbs) in the U.S. House of Representatives, is trying to help correct the effects of high-risk…

Sale of the Week—Hand-built House in Skokie

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List Price: $1,399,000
Sale Price: $1.300,000
The Property: This new 13-room brick and stone house in Skokie’s Devonshire Highlands neighborhood has many custom perks. Among them: motorized lifts on the chandelier and the staircase light fixture (to make cleaning easier); a built-in hutch in the dining room; handsome library shelving; and insulated windows with operable blinds installed between two panes of glass.

The house is the work of a rare builder who actually does much of the construction with his own hands. Anthony Youseph, who has been…

On the Market—Jimmy Stewart in Noble Square

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List Price: $449,000
The Property: A three-bedroom loft condo in a century-old Chicago commercial building with red-brick flourishes on its arches, this home suddenly added a cool tidbit to its profile last week. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon wrote in the paper’s Tempo section about buildings around the city that had appeared over the years in different movies. Reardon’s lead example was an old triangular building at Milwaukee Avenue and Noble Street—Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood—that played a small role in the 1948 film noir docudrama Call Northside 777…